Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday September 11, 2013 @08:10AM
from the i'll-have-a-space-burger-with-space-fries-please dept.

Modern Farmer magazine has an article about NASA's efforts into growing food in space, a slow, difficult process that's nonetheless necessary if humanity is to have any significant presence away from Earth's surface. Quoting:
"This December, NASA plans to launch a set of Kevlar pillow-packs, filled with a material akin to kitty litter, functioning as planters for six romaine lettuce plants. The burgundy-hued lettuce (NASA favors the 'Outredgeous' strain) will be grown under bright-pink LED lights, ready to harvest after just 28 days. NASA has a long history of testing plant growth in space, but the goals have been largely academic. Experiments have included figuring out the effects of zero-gravity on plant growth, testing quick-grow sprouts on shuttle missions and assessing the viability of different kinds of artificial light. But [the Vegetable Production System] is NASA's first attempt to grow produce that could actually sustain space travelers. Naturally, the dream is to create a regenerative growth system, so food could be continually grown on the space station — or, potentially, on moon colonies or Mars. ... Plant size is a vital calculation in determining what to grow on the space station, where every square foot is carefully allotted. Harvest time is also of extreme importance; the program wants to maximize growth cycles within each crew’s (on average) six-month stay."

This reminded me of an old SF story by Asimov. Humans stranded on hostile environment planet, struggling to terraform the environment. Dying one by one, their bodies finally providing the soil for the earth seedstock, but alas not in time for the last survivor. Sniff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Father_(short_story) [wikipedia.org]

There's an abundance of everything we need in space, although I can see stations being a far more convenient platform for future exploration than planetary colonisation. Even the best candidate, Mars, is terrible - where it's warm there is no water, where there's water it's in the -30s at least, an atmosphere as close to vacuum as makes no odds and while it does have gravity I doubt it's enough to stop bone

Yes, because European colonists in the new world went forth boldly into the wilderness stark bollock naked, preferring to gnaw their tools from the deadfalls and cliffs they encountered. It takes time to set things up, but once you're set up you have an abundance in virgin territory. The tools are different but the principle is the same.

2)Space is a dead vacuum, with a few rocks here and there separated by light hours of nothing. If that's "abundant" to you, can I send you there one way?

Doesn't matter how far away the resources are as long as you have a steady supply line. Although in terms of the time it will take to get there, they aren't that far away at

And hey, when you combine that with maglaunch it actually becomes more cost effectiove to pull the stuff out of the sky, taking into account externalities like environmental damage and pollution. All of the raw materials are up there in far more than trace amounts. To respond to your other comm

Oh, wait, we'll still need to expend insane amounts of energy and time trying to get shit from asteroids and the moon just to get the stuff in orbit. The caloric cost alone is disparate by many many orders of magnitude. It's a total waste.

Your links provide no answers, just thoughts that have nothing to do with what you said in regards to a station IN ORBIT. You said 'They can make it' in answer to someone asking 'What will they use for fertilize

You know if you capitalise all of the words in your post it will make what you're saying much more compelling.

If you could point to all of the asteroid resources in orbit, that's be great. If not, why would you imagine I'm talking about staying in orbit? I mean really, even for someone as determined to shriek until the bad facts go away as yourself, that's a bit much in terms of cognitive dissonance.

The ISS, as poor an example as it is, still represents progress. And there's no reason to believe that progre

The "kitty-litter like" substance sounded like (to me) just material to hold the plant in place, since you don't have gravity to do it for you. However, it seems they would go with aeroponics [wikipedia.org] instead?

No, you would not do aeroponics. You would do a mat-based NFT system that would utilize capillary action to ensure even moisture and nutrient content at the roots and contain water (as aeroponics in zero gravity is a huge mistake.)

Guinea pigs are probably a better choice. Reproduce faster, less fat, need less space, and the pellet-type manure is easier to deal with. They thrive on kitchen waste and weeds, and are dumber than pigs so less likely to cause trouble. They're also MUCH less aggressive than a sow in heat (or a boar any time), and the males don't need to be castrated to make the meat eatable. The only disadvantage is that they won't eat meat or fish offal like a pig would, but there are plenty of fish that will do that.

Wow, so much mythunderstanding and so little real knowledge in your reply:

1) Fat is a necessary dietary component. If you don't get it you won't be healthy. Even in space you'll need fat.

2) Pigs don't actually have much fat unless you breed and feed them for it. "Fat Pigs" are made that way primarily through miss-management since few people have lard type pigs now. Even lard type pigs aren't fat if kept on a proper feed.

3) Pigs thrive on kitchen wastes, weeds, pasture and just about anything making them a p

Most of my knowledge of pigs comes from those raised by my dad in the '40s/'50s and my wife's relatives in Peru, so probably none of them would have been the breeds you use. Perfectly willing to be educated, that's what I come to SlashDot for.

A dozen guinea pigs (which do have some fat on them, but not the lard belly that I associate with pork) can be raised on the potato peelings, banana skins, etc. of a family, with a few greens on occasion to round out the diet. In a very large habitat you might have e

"Can you inbreed your porkers, or would you need to have sperm for insemination brought in?"

You can inbreed. It is just like any animal, or plant. Breed the best of the best and eat the rest. Inbreeding problems don't appear by magic but are from recessive genes that become visible. Cull them. That is the problem with inbreeding where people aren't willing to cull the offspring. This is why inbreeding humans is generally frowned on.:)

If they're smart, they'll use solid salt extracts from seawater (look up SEA-90,) supplement the lacking N and P with potash and solid nitrates, and use the water onboard in a very conservative capillary-action root mat + NFT system that will drastically reduce the water usage and waste.

Trying to recycle human waste into fertilizer would be extremely energy intensive and potentially hazardous contamination-wise.

Trying to recycle human waste into fertilizer would be extremely energy intensive and potentially hazardous contamination-wise.

Exposing human waste to hard vacuum and direct sunlight for a while wouldn't be sufficient to sterilize it? I'm actually curious about that.
That would make space toilet design a lot easier. You just need to avoid what happened to U-1206 [wikipedia.org]

It's the breaking down of the materials afterwards into bioavailable nutrient salts that's the issue. Also, bacteria and such can survive a hard vacuum of space and some can even withstand UV bombardment well past UVC range.

I would be more interested in terrestrial applications. Removing pressure on habitats or even letting current farmland revert back to natural habitats would have a large impact on the plasticity of many ecosystems. In short making them more robust to changes in climate for example.

Why? Earth hydroponics already works fantastically. We already have the technology to do it here significantly more efficient. I can grown in a 20X60 greenhouse enough food to easily feed 20 people. The problem is that it's more expensive and takes more labor. 14 foot tall tomato plants take a lot of care, you havet orun pumps 24/7, etc...

It's a lot cheaper to just spread seed over a giant farm ad hope for the best.

Interesting. I would have thought it would be much less labor since everything is closer and in a more controlled environment. That could even lend itself to more automation. Why is it more labor? After all you can't really just "spread seed" for tomatoes in general, at least in my limited experience.

This. If you can avoid importing pests and diseases, then variants of the French biointensive method are probably best for (1) diet (2) converting CO2 to O2, (3) space constraints. Likewise, very little is as effective at energy-efficiency, as human labor. Again, the human labor provides the astronauts with something to do.

I'd suggest that one should calculate how much plant space you need to support each astronaut's breathing, and then go from there. Use the mechanical scrubbers as an automated emerge

And that is why traditional agriculture died out and everything is grown in multi-story, controlled environment greenhouses today...

Unless you're suggesting that there is a conspiracy to stop hydroponics then the very fact that it is the exception and not the norm is evidence enough; however if you're sure that it is so much more profitable then by all means set up a firm and make a killing and I'll be the first to admit that Khyber was not, in fact, making shit up.

In a station with gravity equivalent to the surface of the moon or greater, go with aquaponics. Aquaponics is hydroponics with fish and bacteria included in the system. Instead of soil, you use expanded shale as the growth medium in the grow bed. Red worms live in GB and digest any dead roots or leaves, nitrobacter converts the ammonia waste from the fish into nitrite and nitrate which the plants then take up as nutrients. There are certain plants that can be grown that can provide a good portion of the foo

I think it's a waste of time trying to solve issues of maintaining a biosphere in space, when a push into space will be much easier after we've reached the Singularity: machine bodies don't need food, air or water.

Machines don't need bodies at all. In fact, machines don't want or need anything. Humans are curious though, and like to do essentially pointless things just because we can. So we're going to have our biosphere in space.

Besides, the Singularity is just about AI. It doesn't follow that humans are immediately going to go extinct. We may have decent cyborg bodies before then anyway, and so could reduce our food/air/water requirements too.

You clearly haven't read the book. Short answer is no it's not. Kurzwell goes into great detail how AI, nanotech, and other technology will allow us to slowly merge with technology until we are no longer just biological. If you are going to make pronouncements as what the singularity is, at least read the damn book.

What makes you think that the idea of the singularity is from a single book? Presumably you're referring to Kurzweil's 2005 book. That's just one person's vision of a general concept that has been around since the 1950s:

The technological singularity, or simply the singularity, is a theoretical point in time when human technology (and, particularly, technological intelligence) will have so rapidly progressed that, ultimately, a greater-than-human intelligence will emerge

I think it's a waste of time trying to solve issues of maintaining a biosphere in space, when a push into space will be much easier after we've reached the Singularity: machine bodies don't need food, air or water.

I was told back in 2000 that the Singularity would solve the problem of cheap access to space in twenty years. So we have about seven years to go.

Second, we are already machines. But machines that happen to need food, air, and water. There's no particular reason to wait for the Singularity to do things which we can do now.

gardens are laid out by square footage.given that they probably dont want their plants floating in balls of soil in the middle of the room....they would be secured to the wall or floor of the module.you said yourself "tethered to the floor"... well thats exactly what happens with plants.

also, quibbling over units used for a phrase uttered to illustrrate a concept rather than an actual measurement is silly.

Aeroponics has containment issues. If you're misting water constantly, it's going to go everywhere. In fact it's probably not going to behave quite right either since the water doesn't fall - droplets can aggregate and just float around forever. So you're then looking at a complex vacuum system to keep the water moving through properly.

A fan will blow air from one point to the other, it will pull some water through. But it's just going to blow it into another compartment where it will have the same behavior - coating the walls as much as the plants and then just staying there. It won't run down or run off anything on its own, so you're heading towards gale-force strength winds to try and keep it all moving.

ya mist droplets floating around in microgravity. thats exactly what they need on a space station...no.

Look, most plants simply dont even know how to grow without gravity being present, and the simplest solution is for any actual space farm to be given spin, however slight. so then, rather than using a mister/atomizer (too much energy for droplet size) you can simply run drip lines or semi-permeable hoses through a "soil" medium, for simple and efficient watering. therefore, soil, also being needful for op

The problem with sealing an aeroponics system is that there needs to be some room to allow pressure to escape. No pressure, aeroponics system goes 'pop' and your lid is suddenly half-off, with water droplets floating around.

Have there seriously been no attempts to grow produce in orbit yet? I would have thought it would have been an insanely easy & cheap experiment. Just slap some tomato seeds in a small fabric bag filled with dirt, let them grow a bit and send them up into orbit in a small net enclosure to see how well they grow by one of the stations/shuttles windows.

You can create a pink LED by putting some fluorescent material in a blue or white LED. The problem is that some of the materials used for them are not stable, and will break down within a matter of weeks to months [candlepower.us].

sounds like a hydroponic media that is not good for root production. They'd be better off using rock wool to promote root growth and give the plants something to bind to. Rock wool is pretty easy to create, especially in space where the energy is readily available using a sinmple solar concentrator and feed the matterial through the focal point.

Another advantage of rock wool is the ability to retain a nutrient solution near the root ball to promote plant growth

Wet rock wool makes a happy home for fungi and bacteria (speaking as one who has pulled it out of leaking attics). If pre-seeded with the correct varieties this could be a good thing I suppose, but it could be very dangerous if the wrong varieties take over.

Maybe Im lookin at this wrong, but it seems that you are dealing with a closed system with a leak in that there is only X amount of organic material and Y amount of energy being continually expended by at minimum the people existing (breathing, radiating heat, expending energey..etc) so it seems to be a matter of scale problem at that point..like.. how long you want this thing to go would eventually be determined by how big X is.

" The burgundy-hued lettuce (NASA favors the 'Outredgeous' strain) will be grown under bright-pink LED lights, ready to harvest after just 28 days."

Ignoring the higher quantum yields of green light is going to be a bad mistake. Catch up with the research done not even 4 years ago, NASA. No wonder you can't get a budget when you can't even keep up with the pace of research.

The soil replacement substrate they are testing (arcillite) is highly absorbent and probably is pretreated with the fertilizers. I know that similar experiments (SVET, russian ) were done on the Russion Mir station (my father was leading the team that developed the soil substrate). They used naturally occurring mineral (zeolite) which is extremely good absorbent. You can pretreat it with a fertilizer mix and it will leach small amounts of nutrients and support plant growth for years. All you need to do is a

How the heck are you to make any kind of food other than raw in space? Your microwave oven is going to take 1kW, and you'll get mushy carrots at best. How do you dice in 0g? What about stir-fry? That seems very messy!